COMMENTATORS AND BYZANTINES 
We have come to the last stage of Greek mathematics ; it 
only remains to include in a last chapter references to com 
mentators of more or less note who contributed nothing 
original but have preserved, among observations and explana 
tions obvious or trivial from a mathematical point of view, 
valuable extracts from works which have perished, or 
historical allusions which, in the absence of original docu 
ments, are precious in proportion to their rarity. Nor must 
it E be forgotten that in several cases we probably owe to the 
commentators the fact that the masterpieces of the great 
mathematicians have survived, wholly or partly, in the 
original Greek or at all. This may have been the case even 
with the works of Archimedes on which Eutocius wrote com 
mentaries. It was no doubt these commentaries which 
aroused in the school of Isidorus of Miletus (the colleague 
of Anthemius as architect of Saint Sophia at Constantinople) 
a new interest in the works of Archimedes and caused them 
to be sought out in the various libraries or wherever they had 
lain hid. This revived interest apparently had the effect of 
evoking new versions of the famous works commented upon 
in a form more convenient for the student, with the Doric 
dialect of the original eliminated; this translation of the 
Doric into] the more familiar dialect was systematically 
carried out in those books only which Eutocius commented 
on, and it is these versions which alone survive. Again, 
Eutocius’s commentary on Apollonius’s Conics is extant for 
the first four Books, and it is probably owing to their having 
been commented on by Eutocius, as well as to their being 
• more elementary than the rest, that these four Books alone